Taking your own screenshots and creating your own gamelists

Sometimes the boxarts and other sources for scraping can be low quality and inconsistent in sizes, whereas in game screenshots are standardised to the same size. The following is a simple guide with a script that will help automate the process of taking and scraping your own screenshots.

A few disclaimers first:

MAKE A BACKUP AND USE AT YOUR OWN RISK!

You have to be comfortable with basic Linux commands and simple file editing.

Take a Screenshot

Before talk about the "scraping your own screenshots" trick, we need to know how to take screenshots in RetroArch. If you already know how to do it, you can go to the next section.

via RGUI

Access the RGUI (usually with Select+X) and go to Quick Menu -> Take Screenshot.

via hotkeys

The default screenshot button is F8 which means if you've configured your keyboard through emulationstation you have to hold the hotkey button (by default the button you configured as select) and then press F8. If you want to have it so that you can take a screenshot with your controller you'll change the screenshot button to a button that isn't already being used for hotkey behaviour. To do this you'll edit the overall or global retroarch.cfg at
/opt/retropie/configs/all/retroarch.cfg

The key line you want to change is ~line 580

# Take screenshot
# input_screenshot = f8

So in my case I changed it to my right analogue thumb on my xbox controller (number values vary with diff controllers)

# Take screenshot
input_screenshot_btn = "12"

So in game when I want to take a screenshot I hold select (or rather the back button on the xbox controller) and press the right analogue thumb.

runcommand

The runcommand menu is what is run every time you play a game, It is what allows you to change emulators, set video resolutions, among other things. One lesser known function is the ability to add customised scripts to be executed on the start and/or on the end of the game.

The runcommand-onstart.sh script is executed (if exists) before the game starts, and runcommand-onend.sh is executed (if exists) after you exit the emulator. Both files must be at /opt/retropie/configs/all/ directory.

The two methods described here take advantage from these features.

scraping methods

Here we have two methods to scrape your own screenshots:

Method 1: uses the runcommand-onstart.sh to automatically set some screenshot related configs in system specifics retroarch.cfg files. And after you take some screenshots from the games, you use the SSelph scraper to create a gamelist.xml with them.

Method 2: uses the runcommand-onend.sh to automatically set the most recent screenshot from a game to be the emulationstation image for the respective game.

The main difference between them is:

Method 1: automates the retroarch.cfg configs but you have to use SSelph scraper tool from command line every time you want to update the gamelist.xml with your screenshots.

Method 2: you have to manually edit retroarch.cfg configs, but automates the placement of your screenshots as the respective emulationstation game images.

Now you have to choose which one you want to follow (or read about both):

it will create a gamelist.xml file in /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/snes which takes precedence over the gamelist.xml in /home/pi/.emulationstation/gamelists/snes

and if all went according to plan, when you boot emulationstation back up your images will be the screenshots that you took! TADA!

Also if you want to only add images and leave metadata out entirely you can tell it not to scrape from any databases with -use_gdb=false -use_ovgdb=false

Behind the Code

The following is all taken care of by the aformentioned script but if you're interested this explains essentially what the code is doing (and how you can set it up manually without a script)

Overall retroarch.cfg

You need to add the following line to /opt/retropie/configs/all/retroarch.cfg

auto_screenshot_filename = "false"

This will tell retroarch to name any screenshots taken after the rom name you are playing

System Specific retroarch.cfg

You need create an images folder in each rom folder you want screenshots for and then set the system based retroarch.cfg screenshot path to each respective images folder so that the images can be easily joined with sselphs scraper, unlike the default retropie behaviour this will keep your images and gamelists in each system folder with your roms; the pattern is as follows:

/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/<system>/images

so for example if I'm adding screenshots to the snes I would create:

/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/snes/images

Then I would add that screenshot path to:

/opt/retropie/configs/snes/retroarch.cfg

# Settings made here will only override settings in the global retroarch.cfg if placed above the #include line
input_remapping_directory = "/opt/retropie/configs/snes/"
screenshot_directory = "/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/snes/images/"
#include "/opt/retropie/configs/all/retroarch.cfg"

then we would take our screenshots and use sselphs scraper to generate our gamelist.xml's as above.

METHOD 2

What exactly this method do

If you take a screenshot during a gaming session, the most recent screenshot will be the emulationstation image for this game. This task is done by a runcommand-onend.sh script.

Obviously, there are some conditions to make it happen, in order to let the user easily turn on/off this functionality.

Limitation: This method doesn't work if the emulationstation "save metadata on exit" option is turned on, because it makes emulationstation overwrite the changes made by the runcommand-onend.sh. Turn it off in the emulationstation Main Menu -> Other Settings -> Save Metadata On Exit.

retroarch.cfg

There are two conditions related to RetroArch configuration in order to make it works:

auto_screenshot_filename = "false"

screenshot_directory = "/some/path/to/screenshots"

The auto_screenshot_filename = "false" means that your screenshots will NOT be named automatically, they will always be named as ROM file name.png. Therefore your most recent screenshot will always overwrite the previous one.

Remember this to avoid confusion: auto_screenshot_filename = false means ON for this "scrape screenshots" method. If auto_screenshot_filename is true (or absent), it means OFF.

The directory assigned to screenshot_directoryMUST exist, otherwise RetroArch won't be able to save the screenshots.

Those options can be set in global or system specific retroarch.cfg.

global config (easy way)

Edit your /opt/retropie/configs/all/retroarch.cfg and put the option auto_screenshot_filename = "false". This option isn't present in the default retroarch.cfg, so put it in the beggining of the file is good idea (easy to edit it later).

And then put another line to the option screenshot_directory = "/path/to/screenshots" (I use /home/pi/screenshots, but you can set any other valid path). Remember: the directory MUST exist, otherwise RetroArch won't be able to save the screenshots.

system specific config

If you are happy with the global config, you can jump to the next section. If you want system specific customizations, go on with the reading.

Edit your /opt/retropie/configs/SYSTEM_NAME/retroarch.cfg (replace SYSTEM_NAME with the obvious) and configure it like in the global config above.

The system specific configs take precedence over the global ones. So if you want to explicitly turn on/off this functionality for a specific system, you can set auto_screenshot_filename to false or true, respectively. Note that you have to explicitly set it to true to turn off the scrape screenshots for a specific system. If it is absent, the script will look for this config in the global retroarch.cfg.

If you want to use system specific folders for screenshots, set the screenshot_directory option in the system specific retroarch.cfg. If it is absent, the script will look for this config in the global file.

runcommand-onend.sh

Here we will add a script to be executed when the game ends. If you took a screenshot in a gaming session, the script will automatically set the most recent screenshot as the emulationstation image for the game you've just played.

Get the script that makes it happen here: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/meleu/share/master/screeper.sh

(If you are a shell script guy, maybe you like to read the code. It's well commented.)

Now you can play your game and take your screenshots. The most recent screenshot will be put in your screenshots folder and will be the emulationstation image for this game.

Restart emulationstation

You have to restart emulationstation in order to see the changes. If all went according to plan, your screenshots will be the game images!

"I didn't like how it looks! I want my old images back and disable this stuff!"

Easy, only two steps:

Change the auto_screenshot_filename to true in retroarch.cfg (the runcommand-onend.sh will do nothing if this option is true).

Delete the system specific gamelist.xml that is at the system roms directory (example for SNES: ~/RetroPie/roms/snes/gamelist.xml). It makes the emulationstation get the configs from the original gamelist.xml (more details on how gamelists works here).